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In between two historic Olympic gold-medal performances, Gail Devers’ body was physically falling apart, and she and the doctors couldn’t figure out why. “I started to lose weight — I lost so much weight, I weighed 108 pounds [down from 125]” in 1988, recalled Devers as she spoke to a room full of young females as keynote speaker at the 2012 Reviving Baseball in the Inner Cities (RBI) Softball World Series closing banquet August 11. “My hair was falling out.”

Doctors also discussed amputating her feet before Devers was finally diagnosed in 1989 with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition that causes an overactive thyroid. Graves’ disease is the most common type of hyperthyroidism, caused by a malfunctioning of the immune system as antibodies are produced that attack good cells. As a result, the thyroid cells produce too much thyroid hormone, which in turn, over-stimulates the thyroid. Continue Reading →